This is all good advice. It's very important to see your doctor, and, if you have anything but very mild intermittent symptoms (a few times a year or less), you should also see a pulmonary specialist, who can do pulmonary function testing. I too developed asthma in my thirties, and would never go anywhere without my albuterol (=salbutamol) inhaler. One day I coughed up blood, and THAT was enough to finally get me to a doctor! Pulmonary function testing showed that I had significant chronic changes in my lower airways. Within a month after starting inhaled steroids, I felt better, wasn't coughing all the time, and now I don't even know where my albuterol inhaler is! Advair is a wonderful new treatment: a good inhaled steroid plus a long-acting bronchodilator. From alison's post, it sounds like Seretide is the UK/Oz equivalent.

The anti-inflammatory component of the treatment of asthma is a relatively new development and has improved many lives...and probably saved quite a few. People do die from asthma, and it's not a disease to be taken lightly. If you use a bronchodilator like albuterol (salbutamol) or terbutaline and you find yourself needing to use it every day or nearly every day, RUN to your doctor and find out about inhaled anti-inflammatory treatments. (There are alternatives to steroids, but they don't work for everybody and don't work as well as the steroids.) As best as we can tell, the people who die from asthma are the ones who have a bad attack and keep using their bronchodilator inhaler over and over again.

Definitely avoid any triggers you can recognize. I like Harvey's idea of the sign to prevent people lighting up during your gig. And as far as adjunctive or complementary treatments, my feeling is that many of them can help some people, and I wouldn't reject herbs or acupuncture etc. out of hand. The caveat being that, you should make sure these are recommended or prescribed by a competent practitioner. Self-medication with herbs can be just as dangerous as self-medication with prescription medications...sometimes even more so. (For example, stay away from ephedra, which is a common component of Chinese "lung" remedies: it can cause dangerously high blood pressure.)

And if your doctor tells you that your asthma is "just something you'll have to live with"...find another doctor!

Aloha,
Mark